America’s Other Army

Virginia Blaser, a newly minted American diplomat, was the duty officer at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid one weekend in 1993 when a call came in from two Midwest teachers who had brought a group of teenage students to Spain on their first trip abroad.

A boy from the group was nowhere to be found, and the teachers wanted the embassy’s help to locate him before word about his disappearance reached his parents back home. Blaser alerted the police but couldn’t just sit and wait for something to happen.

“I remember thinking that the child might be out there hurt or scared,” she recalled. “So my husband and I literally walked the streets for two days, hoping that we’d find him just by sheer luck, but of course we didn’t. Eventually, we got a call from the police saying that they had been driving along a highway outside the city and found him — traumatized, dehydrated and sunburned.”

Now a senior Foreign Service officer and deputy chief of mission in Tanzania, Blaser has also served in Uganda, Mauritius, El Salvador, Britain and Belgium, while managing to raise four children. She started out as a consular officer, eager to help fellow Americans abroad. “It may not be a big deal for you when you see hundreds of people a year, but it is a big deal for a little lady from Des Moines who has never traveled overseas and has had her bags grabbed and has been pushed around,” Blaser said. “I love to be the one who can solve her problems…”

Charles Rivkin is an American ambassador of a peculiar kind. He is not a career diplomat but a political appointee, with no previous professional experience in international relations. However, unlike most of his current and former non-career colleagues, he speaks fluently the language of the county he is posted to — France — and is very well plugged-in when it comes to political and social developments there. He has received rave reviews for his performance in Paris both in official State Department audits and from his embassy’s employees.

But it wasn’t Rivkin’s diplomatic skills that landed him the coveted political ambassadorship. Rather, it was his skillful fundraising for President Obama during his 2008 election campaign…

The mob that had gathered at a soccer stadium descended on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, determined to avenge Washington’s recognition of Kosovo — a Serbian province until five days earlier — as an independent state. On that day in February 2008, the Serbian riot police stationed in front of the embassy at the request of U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter conveniently vanished just before the hundreds-strong horde arrived. “The police marched away, got on buses, and drove away, so when the hoodlums came there was no one there,” Munter recalled.

A part of the embassy was soon ablaze. “One of the protesters who was drunk managed to get in and burned himself to death,” Munter said. Several others climbed the fence. The U.S. Marines guarding the compound had every right to shoot, but they managed to drive the intruders away with warnings and instructions instead…